Encyclopedia Categories | Jewish Women's Archive

Politics in the Yishuv and Israel

Institutionalized politics and a variety of factors—the politicization of women’s issues, the Israeli-Arab conflict, the impact of religion on the political arena, and the socio-economic structure—have resulted in both exclusion and inclusion of women in Israeli politics.

Officers of the National Woman's Party, 1922

Anita Pollitzer

As a party organizer for the National Woman’s Party, Anita Pollitzer travelled across the country to earn crucial support for ratifying the Nineteenth Amendment granting American women the vote. Pollitzer was also a patron of the arts and a close friend of Georgia O’Keeffe: it was Pollitzer who showed O’Keeffe’s work to Alfred Stieglitz, jump-starting her career.

Róża Pomeranc-Melcer

Róża Pomeranc Melcer was a social reformer, feminist, and Zionist active in Galicia and later in Eastern Lesser Poland. She was the first and only Jewish Member of Parliament in the Second Polish Republic (1918-1939) and championed the goals of modern Zionist women's politics.

Natalie Portman

Natalie Portman is an actress and activist who takes pride in her acting roles as a reflection of her activism. Her ultimate goal is to raise awareness of the role and importance of women.

Project Kesher

Project Kesher is a feminist Jewish organization empowering women in Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and the Russian-speaking community in Israel to build a society in which inclusive Jewish life can flourish, and where women are the instruments of peaceful change.

Psychology in the United States

Although Jewish women in psychology generally deemphasized their Jewish identities in favor of identifying their work with scientific objectivity and universal human paradigms, they have been well represented in the field as theorists, researchers, and pioneers. They have made their most important contributions in two areas—clinical psychology and the social psychology of intergroup relations, especially as it involves groups marginalized in our society.

Sally Priesand at Hebrew Union College with Rabbinical Students

Rabbis in the United States

Since 1972, when Sally Priesand became the first woman in the world ordained by a rabbinical seminary, hundreds of women have become rabbis in the Reform, Reconstructionist, and Conservative movements. In recent years, womenhave also entered the Orthodox rabbinate, using a variety of titles, including rabbi.

Alicia Jo Rabins

With her indie rock song cycle Girls in Trouble, musician Alicia Jo Rabins has reinterpreted the women of the Bible for a modern audience.

Frances Raday

Frances Raday’s career as a leading human rights advocate, feminist academic, and litigator evolved on no less than three continents: starting in England, passing through Africa, and finally settling in Israel.

Puah Rakovsky

Puah Rakovsky dedicated her life to working towards the empowerment of Jews, particularly of Jewish women. She was a revolutionary woman, taking on important roles as an educator, translator, organizer of women, and an early socialist Zionist.

Reform Judaism in the United States

The 150-year history of organized Reform Judaism in the United States has been marked by a continuous adjustment to roles and expectations for women in Judaism that, in many ways, has been the movement’s signature defining feature. The Reform Movement has been a pioneer in forwarding women’s public engagement and leadership as Jews. At the same time, those advances have often been accompanied by experiences of exclusion and discrimination that have, at times, belied the movement’s rhetorical embrace of equality.

Gail Twersky Reimer

Gail Twersky Reimer is a teacher, writer, editor, passionate advocate for the humanities, and visionary pioneer of Jewish feminism. Reimer founded the Jewish Women’s Archive in 1995 to ensure that Jewish women’s stories would become integral parts of the historical record. Under her leadership, JWA pioneered the use of virtual technology in collecting, chronicling, and transmitting knowledge of Jewish women’s lives.

Adrienne Cecile Rich

Adrienne Rich was an influential poet, thinker, and political activist. In her essays and poems, Rich explored the intersections of the personal and the political, focusing in particular on questions of identity while drawing on her own experiences as a woman, a lesbian, and a Jew.

Lilly Rivlin

Lilly Rivlin is a documentary filmmaker whose films are centered around feminism, the Arab-Israeli peace process, Jewishness, and her family relationships. Rivlin’s films The Tribe (1984), Miriam’s Daughters Now (1986), and Gimme a Kiss (2000), all of which explore Jewishness and family, are among her best.

Lillian Rock

Lillian Rock was a pioneering twentieth-century lawyer, advocate, and organizer who fought for the advancement of women around the world.

Esther Rome

A coauthor of Our Bodies, Ourselves, a classic women’s resource book, Esther Rome came of age with the onset of the modern feminist movement and was a leader in shaping modern American notions of self-help and advocacy for women’s physical and mental health.

Ernestine Rose

Ernestine Rose’s speeches on religious freedom, public education, abolition, and women’s rights earned her the title “Queen of the Platform.” In the 1850s, she was more famous than her co-workers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Yet soon after her death in 1892, she was forgotten because of her status as an immigrant, an atheist, a radical, and a woman.

Roseanne

Roseanne Barr shattered stereotypes of femininity and motherhood with her raunchy, iconoclastic comedy. Her hit sitcom Roseanne highlighted the lives of blue-collar workers and housewives, winning her multiple awards and recognition.

Norma Rosen

Born in Brooklyn in 1925 to secular and assimilated parents, Norma Rosen was an American-Jewish novelist, essayist, educator, editor, and professor. Rosen’s exploration of Jewish history and religion in her writings contributed to questions surrounding Jewish theology and Jewish feminism in the second half of the twentieth century.

Vera Cooper Rubin

Through her groundbreaking research, astronomer Vera Cooper Rubin forever changed our fundamental view of the cosmos, from a universe dominated by starlight to one dominated by dark matter. Among her many accomplishments, she received the Presidential National Medal of Science in 1993 and mentored many astronomers, saying she would always be “available twenty-four hours a day to women astronomers.”

Muriel Rukeyser

Poet Muriel Rukeyser’s prolific body of work reflects her passionate activism and lived experiences. She was present at many important events during the 1930s and was arrested for covering the second Scottsboro trial. Rukeyser spent her entire life as an activist, including involvement in Vietnam War protest efforts.

Marilyn Safir

Marilyn Safir is an American psychologist who played a critical role as a feminist activist in sparking the Israeli women’s movement and in establishing the academic field of women’s studies in Israel. Her academic career has focused on sex, sexuality, and gender.

Alice Salomon

Alice Salomon was an educator, feminist, economist, and international activist who was one of the pioneers of the emerging field of professional social work in Germany in the early 20th century. In 1925 she was among the founders of the German Academy for Women’s Social and Educational Work, and she later served as the first president of the International Committee of Schools of Social Work.

Else Rahel Samulon-Guttmann

Else Samulon-Guttmann showed her exceptional intelligence early in life, studying law at Berlin university and earning a PhD from Heidelberg University. Appointed a judge in 1929, she lost her position with the Nazi rise to power in 1933. Samulon-Guttmann stayed in Germany for her mother and was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944.

Bunny Sandler and Sonia Pressman Fuentes

Bernice Sandler

Bernice (Bunny) Sandler was an activist and education expert who theorized Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, the federal law that mandates sexual equality in educational institutions that receive federal funding. As such, Sandler was an architect of the 1970s feminist “women’s liberation” movement. She continued to fight sex discrimination in education in the following decades, especially on issues of racial inequity and sexual assault.

Sharing Stories
Inspiring Change

The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women

Activism: Feminism